Table for One

An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm.

In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Her fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Throughout Table for One, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Yun’s stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humor highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture. Acquainting the English-speaking audience with one of South Korea’s breakout young writers, Table for One presents a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.

Source: publisher’s website

The collection contains the following stories:

Table for One (1인용 식탁)
Sweet Escape (달콤한 휴가)
Invader Graphic (인베이더 그래픽)
Hyeonmong Park’s Hall of Dreams (박현몽 꿈 철학관)
Roadkill (로드킬)
Time Capsule 1994 (타임캡슐 1994)
Iceland (아이슬란드)
Piercing (피어싱)
Don’t Cry, Hongdo (홍도야 울지 마라)